The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (ISBN 0-674-00426-4) is a collection of essays published in 1960 by Daniel Bell, who described himself as a "socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture". He suggests that the older, grand-humanistic ideologies derived from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been exhausted, and that new, more parochial ideologies would soon arise. He argues that political ideology has become irrelevant among "sensible" people, and that the polity of the future would be driven by piecemeal technological adjustments of the extant system.

Its intellectual honesty was compromised by its author's outspoken anti-Stalinism. (He had been a social democrat in his youth.)

It was disproven by the return of radical discontentment in politics, marked by the 1960s and 1970s youth agitations in the West and the rise of extremist politics in the third world. (Actually, Bell anticipated this in his book. He did, however, fail to anticipate the resurgence of "free market" ideology in the 1970s.)

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. The specific problem is: What Marx wrote seems like a perfect contradiction of Bell, not a support as it is made to look here.. Please help improve this article if you can.(February 2015)

A variety of theories have emerged, even before Daniel Bell's work. Karl Marx, influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, stated that once a state progressed from capitalism, a classless society would emerge, rendering ideology irrelevant (cite?). Daniel Bell, in the 1950s, is often seen as the standard-bearer for the theory. James Burnham, a philosopher and political theorist as well as senior editor of National Review, proffered a similar thesis that foresaw the advent of a state of technocrats, all capable of finding the best answers to political and social problems, making ideology extinct.